Day 24 - An episode you wish never happenedThis is Show. I hoard it and treasure it and braid its hair and have tea parties with it. There is no episode I wish never happened (apart from anything else, that’s logically inconsistent, but that’s a whole ’nother discussion), because this is Show, and Show is its episodes.

And while I, too, would love to have had the six episodes of episodey goodness the writers’ strike precluded, I’ll confess I don’t mind the places it forced the story to go. And here is where I get logically inconsistent with myself – because I like the places, but it also forced the story beyond the capacity, shape and purpose of Show. So the very nature of Show and the very nature of what the story became was incompatible in part, and made it a bit ... well, lumpy. Does that make sense?

Consider: as originally intended, Sam saves Dean from going to Hell in the first place (yay!) but thereby begins the apocalypse (oops). No need for angels or God or Heaven or any of it; it remains a save-Sammy thing, a free will thing, a human vs evil thing. I really do think Kripke meant it when he said No Angels, until the strike meant they couldn’t break the story so that Sam could save Dean, which meant they had to follow through on sending Dean to Hell, which meant they had to figure out how to get him out (as well as rework exactly how Hell functions), which meant angels. Which meant God. Et cetera. And the story suddenly took on proportions it was never constructed to handle. I mean, I didn’t follow this at all at the time, because I don't tend to read interviews with the show makers or anything, but looking at the shape of the story, that’s what seemed to have happened.

I like the concepts that made them deal with. And they were ballsy and creative in the way they attacked it. But if they had been able to stay within the original plan, the story and the seasons themselves would have been of better, more consistent quality in themselves.